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Ten apps to install on your Nexus 7 first

Take your media tablet beyond Google

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Skifta

With Google’s focus on all things Cloud, it’s a bit surprising that the Nexus 7 doesn’t have some sort of DLNA client fitted as standard. But fear not, those clever folk at Qualcomm have created a fast, free and wholly reliable media streaming app in the form of Skifta. The user interface is simplicity itself and Skifta adopts whatever video players you have installed on your tablet so you don't have to worry about codecs if you are trying to watch something obscurely encoded.

Sign up for a free account and you can also stream cloudy stuff like your Facebook, Flickr and Picasa photo libraries, or music from rdio or SoundCloud, or video from TED.

I’ve been using Skifta for nearly a year now on other devices and have streamed content to and from connected TVs, PlayStations, Sonos music players, nas boxes and Philips Streamium devices. Not once has it let me down.

SwiftKey 3

The Jelly Bean keyboard is not at all bad but it’s hardly what I would describe as stylish or packed with options. SwiftKey, on the other hand, is - on both accounts. The version I recommend for the Nexus 7 is the phone rather than tablet incarnation. It looks nigh on perfect to my eyes just so long as you have remembered to set the key height as large. The word prediction is uncannily prescient in part thanks to the app’s ability to peruse your Twitter, Facebook and Gmail scribblings and learn from them.

There are six attractive themes and you can toggle a set of cursor arrows. I refuse to use any keyboard without that last feature.

I’m also a big fan of the press-hold-and-slide function that lets you select common punctuation marks from the key to the right of the space bar and the way that tapping the 123 key opens a 3x3 keypad rather than a range of number across the top of the keyboard.